Expect No Mercy by Nazareth

Expect No Mercy, Nazareth's ninth studio album, hit the racks on A&M in November 1977, and the title is fair warning. After two records that had eased off the throttle, the Dunfermline bruisers went back to the heavy stuff, with the band's own Manny Charlton producing, Dan McCafferty's gravel-throated bellow leading the charge and Pete Agnew in the ranks as he had been since 1968.

The songs are lean and punchy, cut short and sharp: only the closer runs past four minutes, which for a hard rock band in the late '70s counts as positively terse. Two years after Hair of the Dog widened their reach to America, they sound like men swinging their fists with plenty left to settle. The road there wasn't smooth, though: the label turned down an earlier version of the album, and those recordings later surfaced as bonus tracks on a Salvo CD edition.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.